Believing in the Mystery

A Global Picture

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Introduction

On this page I’ll give an overview of world religions, emphasizing the difference between Eastern religions in which God has no attributes, and Western religions in which God has attributes. This distinction is key to the way Daoists, Whitman, and agnostics think: in a religious philosophy where God is without attributes it’s much easier to leave aside doubts about historical accuracy, scriptural authority, and doctrine in general. And agnosticism is all about doubt.

And yet we live in the world, which is full of attributes, and hence doubt must be dealt with. Daoists, Whitman, and agnostics share deep affinities here, since their aim isn’t to make their feelings about God align with any particular geographical, historical, cultural, or scriptural pattern. This affinity allows agnosticism to overlap with theism on one side, just as science and rationality allow agnosticism to overlap with atheism on the other.

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I’ll start by giving an overview of world religions, dividing them into 1. Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, & Daoism) which feature a vague otherworldy Force that can be experienced on the personal level, and 2. Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) which feature a specific Deity who can be experienced on a personal level but is defined within strict historical and scriptural contexts. While versions of God in the East are less likely to have specific attributes, Hinduism stands out for its strong emphasis on Gods with many attributes and an overarching transcendent God that has no attributes. Most versions of God in the West on the other hand emphasize specific attributes — although during the Enlightenment and the Romantic period God takes on a less literal and historical form, and takes on a more abstract and Nature-oriented spirit. In brief, while the Eastern religions tend to emphasize God without attributes more than the Western religions, all these religions contain a mix of the two.

On the next page, God With & Without Attributes, I’ll return to specific comparisons between Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Whitman. I’ll argue that while Daoists and Whitman tend to emphasize God without attributes, they do this in different ways: the Daoists use the attributes to lose themselves in the infinity of God without attributes; Whitman emphasizes the attributes themselves, while at the same time seeing them as a function of the unity of God without attributes.

On both pages I’ll suggest that it’s easier for agnostics to explore a vague transcendent Force without specific attributes than it is for them to explore a Force that has particular historical and scriptural attributes. For this reason agnostics lean toward a Romantic and Transcendentalist view of spirituality, which has much in common with Eastern religion and with Daoism in particular.

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While it’s well-established that English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism borrowed from Neoplatonism, skepticism, and Hinduism, the relation to Daoism isn’t clear. I’d like to clarify things not by making more divisions but by drawing a map which only suggests a connection, all the while accepting that there is no real tangible connection. In other words, I’d like to clarify things by making it clear that clarity is impossible.

Imagine a map of the world with the Pacific Ocean at the centre.

🌎 Beginning deep in the Middle East, Christianity expands westward from Israel and Greece, to the fringes of Europe, and finally to the Americas. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, sees a passage to India, yet never takes a boat. The Pacific sits there on the western side of the ship, waiting to be sailed.

🌏 On the other side of the Pacific, Buddhism expands eastward from India, down to Bali and up to China. The homegrown Daoist elements in Chan Buddhism expand to Japan, only to find themselves in mid air, in a Zen hand about to clap. The index finger of the hand points to the open space, over the waves, beyond the farther shores that Buddha talked about, across the endless waves of the Eastern sea.

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One might argue that the Western shift in the definition of God started with the Enlightenment, when the God of the Deists started to resemble a Clockmaker and the universe started to resemble His clock. This view of a detached God appears similar to the neoplatonic view of the One, the Buddhist view of the Absolute, the Hindu notion of Brahman, and the Chinese concept of the Dao.

Yet in Europe, as we go from the 18th to the 19th century, this clockmaker God starts to look like a terribly detached version of Spirit. Romantic poets like Blake wonder if the holy, revolutionary spirit of Love can really take on the appearance of a geometer:

The God with the cosmic divider that we see in Blake’s Ancient of Days (1794) takes on a more constrained aspect in his Newton (1795):

In Newton, Blake divides himself from the Age of Reason, and from the notion of a cold and calculating God, one who would let Newton, with his math and angles, define the world we live in. Wikipedia notes that Blake here “demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.”

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After the otherworldy mysticism of the Middle Ages and the worldly rationality of the Age of Reason, the Romantics tended to avoid religious or rational extremes. They saw God not in religious doctrine but rather in the mystical heights and the serene beauties of Nature. In this they share a great deal with the Daoists, who were heir to the Chinese poetic tradition of finding beauty and spirituality in Nature.

I would go so far as to say that Daoism, Romanticism, & Transcendentalism (the poetic heir of Romanticism) share a deeply integrated mix of an abstract spiritual God and a concrete physical world, which both derives and ends in this abstraction. As a result, their poetries tend to contain 1. nature symbolism and paradox leading to an ineffable Infinity, and 2. an immersion in the beauty and sensuality of a world liberated from doctrine and dogma.

It’s here that the connection to agnosticism is most strong: Daoists, Romantics, Transcendentalists, and agnostics feel completely free to explore God and religion in any way they please — be it Blake’s vision of infinity in a grain of sand, Wordsworth’s spot in time, Shelley’s ineffable peak of Mont Blanc, Keats & Byron’s Beauty, or Whitman’s puzzle of puzzles. While their poetic visions of life share some of the idealism of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Western religion, their views of God and religion aren’t systematized, except insofar as they resist systems, rules, doctrines, and all other manner of religious convention. In this they are close to Laozi’s uncarved block, to Zhuangzi’s calm dive into the whirlpool, and to the latent skepticism of Daoism, which is the only world religion which staunchly refuses to define itself or to say whether or not we go anywhere after we die.

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A Key Religious Distinction

The question of whether or not God has attributes is an enormous topic in religion. It’s also crucial in getting at agnosticism, since the notion of belief is partially defined by what exactly we believe in. If we believe in a metaphysical or supernatural Force which is mysterious and has no definition, this belief can’t be verified, backed up by an infallible text, or otherwise subject to a great deal of rational scrutiny. We see the reasoning behind why we want such a Force to exist (or feel that such a Force exists), but our rational mind can’t conclude that it must therefore exist in some particular established or formulaic way, much less that it can be explained historically or in some particular piece of writing. It remains a feeling or intuition. And since we experience this Force as something other than physical, all the physical evidence in the world can’t be used to negate it.

Yet if we say that God made a statement or did a particular thing in the physical world, then we can judge the statement and examine that thing. Did God really give ten commandments on a mountain top? Did He really part the Red Sea? It’s much harder for an agnostic to entertain that than to entertain the notion that there might be an invisible Force that lies behind what we see, just as waves fly in the air or move through our brain.

Any religion which requires people to take it on faith won’t appeal to agnostics because they have no faith — which is why they’re called agnostics. Religions which refer to individual experience as the touchstone of faith are more appealing to agnostics because everyone has individual experience, and agnostics can try it out for themselves. Personal experience lies in the realm of phenomenology, which opens belief from the inside rather than imposes it from the outside. As a result, agnostics feels much more free to give it a try. They don’t immediately run up against the problem of verification, historical claims, or scriptural authority.

Any claim about an action or communication by God becomes hard to back up if we have no evidence, whereas a claim about a transcendent Force, one which doesn’t make statements but can only be intuited or felt, doesn’t try to explain it in terms of the physical world and hence isn’t subject to the same degree of physical or historical objection. We don’t of course have to believe the person who says there’s a transcendent Force, yet it’s beside the point to talk about physical, textual, or historical proof. We can question the belief in terms of psychological or phenomenological likelihood, yet given the uniqueness of each person, and given the exceptional complexity of the human brain, we quickly get into a quagmire of questions (about such things as the nature of waves and quantum fields). We soon reach a realm of complexity and obscurity that’s far more difficult to deal with than when we’re confronted with religious statements such as The earth doesn’t move. As rational people, we’re forced to take the statement as an error, one made in a pre-scientific age. We simply can’t see this statement as one that comes from a writer who got his astrophysical understanding from God. And if he didn’t get this piece of information from God, what else didn’t he get?

It’s for this reason that agnosticism leans toward theologies that refuse to give concrete or historical definitions of God. Yet this is putting it too simplistically, since some Eastern versions of God have plenty of concrete attributes and since some Western versions of God can also become extremely abstract. It would be more accurate to say that agnostics lean more toward Eastern theology and Western philosophy and poetry, and less toward Western religion and Eastern superstition. I make these distinctions because while Eastern theology may be structured largely along ahistorical transcendent lines, believers in the East often entertain very specific superstitions, which are attributes of a very dubious kind (at least according to agnostics). In Buddhism and Daoism, these superstitions seem to have little to do with the more abstract theologies to which why’re attached. For instance, the rarified thought of Zhuangzi has little to do with later Daoist interest in alchemy. In Hinduism, however, the picture is more mixed: Hindus have very rarified and transcendent paradigms as well as an almost limitless number of immanent and superstitious scenarios. Many of the immanent scenarios — for instance stories about gods and sages — contain aspects we think of as superstitious, such as possession and magic powers. And yet the staggering multiplicity of stories makes it very hard to be dogmatic about any given story. In default, Hindus refer back to the notion that all story versions are permissible and all versions lead back to the One Godhead.

Agnostics remain very skeptical about superstitions yet agree with Hindus that there’s no one way to see religion. Agnostics and Hindus agree that people ought to be free to explore religion as they see fit. Hindus may believe in a host of superstitions or a host of stories about the gods. They may follow one god among many (for instance, Krishna) or they may see all gods as manifestations of the God which lies beyond all gods (Brahman). For agnostics the takeaway is the same: we’re all free to explore any form of worship we like. Or, we can forego worship all together, and focus instead on more speculative or skeptical philosophies, of which there is a large variety in Hinduism — for instance, the ancient Ajñaña school of thought.

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Vedanta’s Brahman

The question of God with or without attributes only appears to divide the highly-developed philosophies of Hinduism, with the non-dualist Advaita Vedanta on one side and the qualified non-dualist Visist Advaita Vedanta on the other. For many Hindus, the split is only in appearance, because for them Nirguna Brahman (Brahman without attributes) faces the void while Saguna Brahman (Brahman with attributes) faces the relative universe. Brahman thus remains beyond existence and also within the finest levels of existence. These finest, most elevated levels give rise to space and time, to the Creator (Brahma), the Preserver (Vishnu), the destroyer (Shiva), and to the endless variety of natural and supernatural beings. The division between fine and gross is an apparent one, for in the coveted mystical vision — whether momentary samadhi or permanent moksha or nirvana — all of this relative existence is seen in terms of That or Brahman. Hence the phrase, I am that, thou art that, and all this is that.

Satanarayana Dasa Babaji stresses that Nirguna Brahman isn’t completely without attributes. Rather, it’s without material attributes, yet not without the spiritual attributes that give rise to the material universe:

The Void & Bodhisattvas

Buddhism, which derives from Hinduism, aims at an ultimate state devoid of material qualities, and thus seems at first glance to fall into the transcendentalist side of religion. The Buddhist Absolute is often seen as a full void, and despite the belief in bodhisattvas (benevolent incarnations), the full void of the Absolute is so strongly emphasized that some see Buddhism as a religion with no God at all. Yet this view leaves out the wide range of selfless buddhas or bodhisattvas who so compassionate with the suffering of this world that they are willing to forego Paradise in order to help other humans. The purely transcendentalist view of Buddhism also leaves out the hells and paradises, and all the complicated otherworldy realms and spiritual beings that are particularly characteristic of Mahayana Buddhism. Here, for instance, is Amitāyus Buddha in his elegant, elaborate paradise:

Abraham & Sons

Buddhism may however appear to lean to the transcendent side of religion (that is, God without attributes) when compared to Western religions’s emphasis on the immanence of God — that is, on God understood as often operating in the material world. The God of the Western or Abrahamic religions has a gender, intervenes in history, prescribes holy texts, gives specific advice about political and everyday matters, brings about miracles, gives birth to a Son, etc. There are of course branches of Western religion which place a greater emphasis on mystical ineffability and less on God’s words and actions. For instance, neoplatonist Christians see the universe in terms of emanations from the One, which is forever beyond everything. Sufis aim to extinguish the self so that it can merge with a God that’s beyond all definition, text, or dogma. The New World Encyclopedia gives the following account of negative theology, which has deep roots in Judaism and Christianity yet can be applied to other religions as well:

Negative theology is found in various world religions and is based on two common presuppositions: Given the vast magnitude of divinity, it is assumed that any human descriptions of the Divine should be based on utter humility; secondly, if the human mind cannot entirely grasp the infinity of God, then all the words and concepts presumably fail to adequately describe God. At best, human languages provide a limited description of divinity, like seeing the tip of an iceberg. Those who espouse Negative theology, therefore, claim that it is better to avoid making affirmations about God in order to prevent placing God in a "cage of concepts," which may limit human understanding of God and "become a type of intellectual idolatry" [Scott Daniel Dunbar, Lecture on Religious Philosophy].

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Daoism, Romanticism, & Transcendentalism

Daoism has strong similarities to Negative Theology and to Neoplatonism, Hinduism, Romanticism, and Transcendentalism. In all of these, the line between God and Nature, the Transcendent and the Immanent, isn’t so clearly defined as it is in traditional Western religion. Even though the Daoists couldn’t have known about Plato or the Western poetic tradition, Laozi and Zhuangzi are surprisingly similar to the Romantic poets and Whitman. This is somewhat true with Laozi, whose oracular conviction is similar to Blake, and whose symbolism and idealism is similar to Shelley and Coleridge. The similarities are more striking however with Zhuangzi, who shares the idealism of Shelley, Coleridge, and Blake, yet is less like his predecessor Laozi than he is like Byron in his playful iconoclasm, and more like Keats & Byron in his combination of openness and doubt.

Whitman is a blend of the above: he has the firm conviction of Laozi & Blake, and he has the open speculation and sensibility of Zhuangzi — which makes him not far from the neoplatonism of Shelley, the idealism of Coleridge, and the common touch of Wordsworth & Keats.

Between Whitman’s America and Zhuangzi’s China, there’s only space and time: the Pacific Ocean and two thousand years.

In the vague grand scheme of things imagined by Whitman and the Daoists, this distance — yea, the great globe itself and all that it inherit — is only a dot.

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Next: God With & Without Attributes [in progress]

Temporarily next: Rushdie 1: The Fiction of Doubt: The Rise of the Simurg

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